15 Celebrities Accused of Shocking Crimes

With all the coverage celebrities get from tabloids and gossip blogs, an actor can barely sneeze without it getting reported to the masses. That being so, it should come as no surprise that major crimes committed by Hollywood elites rarely (if ever) go unnoticed. A handful of celebrities are responsible for (or have at least been accused of) some heinous crimes, and we have the definitive list. Here are the worst of the worst.

1. Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp | John Phillips/Getty Images

The allegations levied against Johnny Depp by his ex-wife, Amber Heard, are pretty damning. In divorce filings, Heard accused Depp of being “verbally and physically abusive” throughout their marriage, detailing an incident where he viciously hit her across the face with a cellphone. Shortly after, Heard was granted a restraining order and exclusive use of their previously shared apartment.

2. Casey Affleck

Casey Affleck | Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Casey Affleck may have won an Oscar for his role in Manchester by the Sea, but that was accompanied by a good deal of controversy, largely surrounding a series of sexual abuse allegations. The Daily Beast details how Affleck, during the filming of his documentary I’m Still Here, “repeatedly referred to women as ‘cows,’ and recounted his sexual exploits with reckless abandon.”

That’s only the tip of the iceberg too, with I’m Still Here‘s director of photography, Magdalena Gorka, describing her experience working with Affleck as “the most traumatizing of her career.” A complaint filed by Gorka outlines an incident where she woke up in the middle of the night to find Affleck curled up in bed beside her. All in all, it makes for a troubling pattern of behavior for the Oscar-winning actor.

3. Mark Wahlberg

Mark Wahlberg | Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Mark Wahlberg’s history of violence is something that’s often been shuffled off to the side. In a telling Defamer article titled “Remember When Mark Wahlberg Was a Violent Racist Bully,” it details everything from an incident where Wahlberg “yelled racial slurs and threw rocks at schoolchildren,” to one where he split a man’s head open with a stick, calling him a “Vietnam f**king sh*t.”

After fleeing the scene of that crime, he found a second Vietnamese man, who he punched in the eye and permanently blinded. At just 16 years old at the time, Wahlberg was sentenced to 90 days in prison, going on to serve 45 of them before he was released.

4. O.J. Simpson

O.J. Simpson | Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Perhaps the most high-profile criminal on our list, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown in the mid-’90s. He was found guilty in a civil proceeding soon after though, where he was “found liable for the wrongful deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and ordered to pay their families $33.5 million in damages.”

Things didn’t get much better from there for Simpson, who was convicted in 2008 of 12 counts of armed robbery and kidnapping, after holding a pair of sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison, but he’s eligible for parole starting in 2017.

5. Jared Fogle

Jared Fogle | Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Jared Fogle spent years as Subway’s most prominent spokesperson. That all came crashing down in 2015 though, when he pled guilty to “to possessing and distributing child porn, and to traveling across state lines to have sex with at least two teenage girls” (per a report from CNN).

Fogle is now serving a 12.5-year sentence in prison, and “will pay restitution to the 14 victims who were secretly photographed in the images possessed by Fogle or who he paid for sex.”

6. T.I.

T.I. | Jason Kempin/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Any time there’s an article floating around that lists off a number of your worst crimes, you know you’re probably doing something wrong. Enter T.I., who’s currently the subject of a similar article over at Prefix. The list includes a 1997 charge for “manufacturing and distributing crack cocaine,” “battery of a law enforcement officer” in 2003, violating his probation that same year, “purchase and possession of automatic weapons” in 2007, and “possession of controlled substances” in 2010.

7. Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson | Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Mel Gibson’s name has come up in a couple of highly publicized incidents. First, we have his infamous DUI traffic stop, where he screamed anti-Semitic obscenities at a police officer, resisted arrest, and generally made a spectacle of himself. It was an incident so damning, that his Hollywood career has only just begun to recover.

Gibson also reached a plea deal in a domestic violence case in 2016, “to a charge of misdemeanor battery of his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva.”

8. Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby | ABC

Bill Cosby’s alleged crimes have been well-documented over the last couple years. Currently, Cosby is embroiled in litigation, numbering upward of eight civil suits, as well as a criminal sexual assault case. The charges stem from dozens of women who’ve stepped forward to accuse him of various counts of sexual abuse, assault, and rape, and given the sheer numbers stacked against him, it’s hard not to believe them.

9. Phil Rudd

AC/DC drummer, Phil Rudd | Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images

Phil Rudd makes this list for one of the more bizarre crimes in the world of celebrities. Back in 2014, the former AC/DC drummer was charged in a New Zealand court for hiring a hitman to kill two people. According to CNN, “he was also charged with threatening to kill, possession of methamphetamine and possession of cannabis.”

10. Chris Brown

Chris Brown | Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Chris Brown has struggled to stay out of trouble throughout his career. In 2009, he got into a physical altercation with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, leaving her battered, bruised, and subsequently hospitalized. After Robin Roberts questioned him about the incident in a 2011 episode of Good Morning America, Brown threw a chair through his dressing room window in a fit of rage, before leaving the building shirtless.

From there, it’s a laundry list of physical fights involving other rappers, battery charges, various violations of probation, and a stint in jail stemming from him leaving a court-ordered treatment program too early.

11. Lil Wayne

Lil Wayne | Michael Tullberg/Getty Images for Coachella

Rolling Stone has a handy timeline full of Lil Wayne’s various criminal transgressions, so we’ll just highlight the most prominent one. After his first headlining show in 2007, the rapper was arrested, “and charged with one count of criminal weapons possession and one charge of criminal possession of a loaded weapon.”

After a series of delays (and following a guilty plea from Lil Wayne), he began his year-long stint in prison in 2010.

12. Josh Duggar

Josh Duggar | Brian Frank/Reuters

Josh Duggar first became known on TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting. The series was quickly canceled by the network in 2015 though, after it was revealed that Duggar sexually molested five girls, his own sisters among them. The crimes were allegedly covered up by his parents in an effort to save face.

13. Stephen Collins

Stephen Collins | Michael Buckner/Getty Images

Many kids grew up seeing Stephen Collins play a stern yet fair father figure on 7th Heaven. In reality, things were far darker, after Collins “publicly admitted that he engaged in sexual misconduct with three girls.” The incidents occurred across three separate decades, but they all sit outside of the statute of limitations, unfortunately making it so he’ll never serve jail time.

14. Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart | Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images

Martha Stewart isn’t all floral arrangements and home decorating tips, evidenced by jail time served for insider trading. In the end, she was “indicted by a federal grand jury today on charges of securities fraud, making false statements and obstruction of justice for her handling of a personal stock trade.”

15. Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. | Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Robert Downey Jr.’s image has recovered in the years since his most recent crimes, but it wasn’t always sunshine and roses for Marvel’s highest-paid actor. After being “introduced to drugs at the age of eight by his father, (he) developed a full-fledged addiction as he headed into his 20s.”

A series of visits to rehab and a year-long jail sentence later, he’s managed to get his life back on track.